Veritas and IBM Global Services play backup

We've yet to see how IBM's Tivoli storage range will fare with the deal

www.IT-Analysis.com, VNU Business Publications 14 Dec 2001

It is often said that IT is a small, incestuous world where it sometimes appears that everyone knows everyone else.

In almost any computer-related gathering, it is clear that more often than not there will be people present who have worked for each other's company and who have colleagues (either past or present) in common.

Equally, it has become something of a fashion for vendors to create a number of partnerships with other suppliers.

These partnerships occasionally bring together organisations that in the normal course of business might even be considered competitors.

Today we have news of yet another partnership, this time between the world's largest IT service organisation, IBM Global Services, and storage software heavyweight, Veritas.

It has been reported that IBM's Global Service staff will now be able to offer the full range of storage management tools produced by Veritas, including the data protection software (otherwise know as backup and recovery).

It is clear that there is very strong demand in the market for storage management tools as businesses move increasingly towards continuous operations and the real value of the data is recognised.

Veritas has a very strong presence and is widely seen as being the market leader in many areas.

The company has partnerships with a large and diverse group of resellers and its products are often selected not just on the functionality of the software tools themselves, but also because Veritas supplies no storage hardware components at all, making it truly storage platform independent.

The benefits to Veritas of partnering with IBM are clear. IBM Global Services have extensive reach and are well respected, especially in larger organisations that operate in numerous geographies across the world.

Equally, as far as Global Services are concerned, it is always a bonus to be able to offer a widely recognised product set that has high brand awareness amongst storage professionals.

However, it is important to remember that IBM has its own set of storage management software tools. The Tivoli storage software products compete head-to-head with those of Veritas in many areas, especially in the data protection sector.

It will be interesting to see what software product Global Services might recommend to a potential customer where both the Tivoli and Veritas products could work.

It is likely that this scenario may not appear too frequently, as many organisations may already possess a preference for one of the two suites of tools, but it is clear that there will be occasions when Global Services will have to make the choice.

This may well make for some very awkward meetings in the future between representatives of IBM Global Services and Tivoli.

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